Communication networks typically include a number of switches that are operable to connect various resources available on the network to endpoint devices. In many switches, a firmware defect or upgrade can affect connectivity of these endpoint devices. This can occur either because services provided by the switch may be restarted internally, or because the switch itself is rebooted entirely. When a network encounters issues or requires an upgrade, often endpoint devices experience outages, which are mainly due to a lack of redundancy in the network. For example, before performing a network upgrade, the administrator often has to analyze the network to determine where the upgrade can result in an outage. In the best case, the network is fully redundant and each switch can be upgraded without impacting endpoints. In the worst case, there is no redundancy in the network and the entire network has to be upgraded in a single outage window that affects all endpoints.
An existing solution estimates the downtime and cost of downtime in an information technology network by using a model tree to simulate the network. Each element is assigned a workload, and a cost of downtime caused by element failures is determined by multiplying an amount of workload that is lost from the simulated element failures by the cost per unit workload. Another existing method determines the impact of failures in a data center network by identifying failures for the data center network based on data about the data center network, and grouping the failures into failure event groups including related failures for a network element. The method also estimates the impact of the failures for each of the failure event groups by correlating the failures with traffic for the data center network.
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